Scott is pointing us to a bunch of great, new edublogs lately (Thanks! ) and I enjoy reading the writings of others who are relatively new on the scene. Yesterday he pointed us to Snacks and Staff Meetings. Brian‘s post on the 10 things he didn’t learn in his masters program inspired me to cobble together some similar thoughts I’ve had over the last 3 years. I’d often had these thoughts on the job, but Brian beat me to the punch. And so, Letterman style, here are my…
Top 10 Things I Didn’t Learn in Grad School
- A sense of humor is required. ("You mean someone pee’d on your door handle while you were parked in the student lot? And it’s frozen?")
- We’re always broke. Always. ("I’m sorry – we can’t afford a class set of scannning electron microscopes…")
- …although I might be able to come up with some money… ("Have you considered magnifying glasses?")
- Kids aren’t the only ones who sometimes behave badly.
- (Corollary to #4) When I was a teacher, my principal must have loved me.
- There is an inverse relationship between the level of student engagement in a particular class and the number of disicpline referrals that come from that class.
- There is very rarely a need to use complete words
when speaking to a colleague. ("Scott – Regarding the ESL program, I
need you to attend the ELA training so we can move our ELLs toward AYP,
OK? Can you confirm that ASAP?")
- Change is hard. And sometimes things fall off a bit before they begin to improve.
- You can’t teach good teaching and you can’t motivate with policy.
- When everything is said and done, I can’t believe I get paid to do this. Most days…
I wonder if Brian has the makings of a meme here…
Top thing I learned while writing this post in Google Docs: You can’t make the numbers count down instead of up…
Powered by FireStats